Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez say legalize drugs

Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez has once again called publicly for the legalization of drugs. In a message sent by video hook-up from Mexico City, García Márquez told a conference convened Saturday to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the University of Antioquia en Medellin that it was impossible to end the violence in his home country without ending drug prohibition. "It is impossible to imagine an end to the violence in Colombia without the elimination of the drug trade, and it is unimaginable to end the drug trade without the legalization of drugs, which become more dear the more they are prohibited," said the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Comparing Colombia's current bloody, multi-sided civil war with La Violencia, the deadly upheaval that wracked the country in the 1940s and 1950s, García Márquez noted that last

Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez has once again called publicly for the legalization of drugs. In a message sent by video hook-up from Mexico City, García Márquez told a conference convened Saturday to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the University of Antioquia en Medellin that it was impossible to end the violence in his home country without ending drug prohibition. "It is impossible to imagine an end to the violence in Colombia without the elimination of the drug trade, and it is unimaginable to end the drug trade without the legalization of drugs, which become more dear the more they are prohibited," said the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Comparing Colombia's current bloody, multi-sided civil war with La Violencia, the deadly upheaval that wracked the country in the 1940s and 1950s, García Márquez noted that last year there were "about 400,000 Colombians who had to flee their houses or plots because of the violence, just as 3,000,000 had to do for the same reason a half-century ago. The displaced are the embryo of another country -- almost as populous as Bogota, perhaps more so than Medellin -- that goes in search of a place to survive with nothing more than the shirt on its back," García Márquez said. "The paradox is that those fugitives are victims of a violence sustained by two of the most profitable businesses in the world: the drug traffic and the illegal arms trade."

As for the United States effort to wipe out the drug trade and the country's leftist guerrillas, García Márquez said such policies showed an "imperial voracity" toward Colombia. President Alvaro Uribe, whose hard-line policies are strongly backed by Washington was in attendance at the conference, but his reaction to García Márquez' remarks is unknown